Istanbul, Not Constantinople
by Elliptic Eye
Summary: Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.
1. One

**Istanbul (Not Constantinople)**

One

_So take me back to Constantinople_

_(no, you can't go back to Constantinople_

_been a long time gone, Constantinople)_

—Jimmy Kennedy

"We have got to stop meeting like this," said the Doctor irritably.

The Valeyard sighed, raised his gun, and hoped that Mel wasn't about to round the corner. "Tell me about it."

* * *

Committing suicide was a real challenge if you were a Time Lord.

No, but seriously. There were all the jokes about "What goes 'BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump BANG thump'?", yes, but it was the temporal mechanics that got you. If you were thorough about it, anyway. He needed to be thorough.

On Gallifrey, retroactive suicide and temporal disbursal without the sanction of the High Council had been higher crimes than genocide. There had been sound reasons for this. Now, in a now that did not mean the same thing that it had once meant (should have meant, had never meant), those reasons became just strings of symbols, statements chasing their tails. His own existence was a paradox, and that the universe had not imploded in the moment he'd become one really should have been a tip-off that something was terribly wrong.

Gallifrey, it transpired, had been propping open a number of paradoxes itself.

Incoherence is all the more insidious when it cannot be seen directly. Incoherence on a sufficiently magnificent scale is almost impossible to see at all; the majority of the universe's religions and term papers depend on that. It was only because the Doctor remembered a history with a hitching post, only because he was half a product of a universe where the Eye of Harmony had ensured that events correlated with each other that he had even been able to have his suspicions.

It had been such a gradual thing. So gradual, and so immense, and so absurd, like pictures of drowned polar bears had been to humans. After all, if the Eye of Harmony was an artifact, then surely the universe without it was in its natural state. Only by degrees had the Doctor begun to play with the idea that the universe in its natural state might be downright inimical to what he and everybody else understood as time. Once he had made a start, though, it wasn't long before it was a play he found enchanting, like a good date for dinner. It was an even shorter time before he began to consider the obvious solution.

He did not know how he could do it. He did not know whether it could be done. Oh, the general idea was simple: Go back in time and take one's own life in a previous incarnation. But how to manage the resulting paradox? It wasn't as though he'd be around to deal with the cleanup, he'd be dead. Even the journey itself might be impossible, for all he knew; he'd never attempted a self-intersection without the Celestial Intervention Agency. There simply were too many factors. Resistance from the TARDIS. Distortion from folding the timeline back along itself. Dying at the hand of his former self instead of the other way around. Harm to any previous companions he might encounter.

And even if he could account for all of them, it still left the question of when.

* * *

Once there was a place called the Matrix. Time there ran just like the clock out in the hallway, which is to say according to convention and whatever key you supplied yourself, and mysteries grew like crystals in the dark. Passions (which are events) tessellated and metamorphosed into people, birds, stars, qualities, distances, ratios, then back into the same fabric that lay under everything, because they were things the Matrix remembered. If you stepped on a bit of basketweave paving, you might fall onto a Cairo tiling. If you started out a beach ball and stepped in front of a lamp, you might end up an ellipse. The Matrix was most often studied by computer scientists and had perhaps even been created by them, but it had more in common with Flint's Map than with a computer or even a TARDIS.

Once there was a man called Rassilon. The ones who came after him would be called Time Lords, but since they could only be those after Rassilon, he was just a man. He dreamed of time travel, but before he could journey freely between events, he had to drive a hitching post into the center of the universe and draw them all into some relationship with each other, however elastic. He had never heard of a human figure called Bertrand Russell, but aeons later, a progressive indie rock band on Gagatarius IV would write a song with lyrics making fun of both of them for trying to do the same thing.

Then there was a man called the Doctor. He blew up the hitching post.

* * *

Rassilon Era:

Rassilon Era:

Rassilon Era:

* * *

It hadn't been as difficult to figure out as he had expected, or would have expected if it had been the kind of thing he could have expected, which, by definition, it wasn't. He'd been on Courrol, where one entrepreneur had arrived on the cusp of spontaneously, and accidentally, creating AI in a gestalt of nanobots his company happened not to have programmed to know what life was. No evil; merely stupidity. The Doctor hadn't really been certain this civilization was worth saving, but he'd ended up saving it out of habit. And for a reasonable price. He'd neutralized the swarm, and the plant had been in a remote location (_white cliffs over azure sea, sun-bleached stone, winding roads_); the EM pulse had killed only the directors, the workers, and him.

He woke sprawled over sharp stones. Sea water lapped at his cheek and tugged at his ankle. He lay for a long time, watching the dazzle of suns on water while warm salt swelled up over and over, stealing blood from his side. He remembered a monkey a friend had had once. It had been a shy, docile creature, but whenever its master had brought out a plate of fruit for company, it would hide behind a vase on the bookcase, eyes big in its tiny, golden face, and dart out to steal grapes at perfectly regular five-minute intervals. The Doctor managed to get a little blue sea water in his hand; he smiled at it.

Eventually he stood up. Mid-morning for one sun, high noon for the other. His clothes felt funny. Pale _sh'ika_ were winging in from the sea to alight on the dark feathered things that had fallen here and there on the cliffs. On a low shelf of rock he could see a structure, blue glass and white wood growing out of white stone: the plant director's boathouse. He made his way toward it. The _sh'ika_ cried. He gained the path that led up to it from the shore; the director's dog lay dead outside in a spill of black. The Doctor let himself in and passed out on the sofa.

He woke again in the dark, pulled himself into the lavatory, palmed the light control, and looked into the mirror.

_"Fuck,"_ he said.

He stared at himself. His reflection stared back at him, looking even more shell-shocked than he did. He felt a rush of fury.

"You were expecting somebody else?" the Valeyard said mockingly.

Well, yes. He had been. Not so much a specific anticipation as having generally forgot about the whole thing. It was just another piece of Gallifrey, another history he'd killed. It was supposed to be, anyway. This, he supposed, was what came of taking the Master at his word. The man could be dead seven centuries and still stab him in the back.

"I am the Doctor," he said, and recoiled. It was beyond disconcerting to hear himself say it in a voice he already knew.

"I am the brick—the Valeyard," he ventured. "I am the Valeyard."

He tried to think back on what he knew about the Valeyard. It was difficult; it had been many centuries. Even when he found the right place in his memory, he uncovered more assumptions than knowledge, and those crusted, algaed, barnacled. If he sought among the wreckage, he could just find the Master's words: an amalgamation of the darkest sides of his nature somewhere between his twelfth and final regenerations.

He peered into the mirror. He didn't feel like an amalgamation of darkest sides. He felt pretty normal, in fact.

Seriously, what the hell was he supposed to do with this? His talents were designing Rube Goldberg machines, practical application of chaos theory, and saving planets, mostly; the few occasions when he'd deliberately tried to play the villain had been disasters. There'd been Ace to attest to that, once. And the Valeyard hadn't been merely a villain, he'd been a legal villain. The Doctor had never even passed law school. He'd never even passed in an _Earth_ law school. He supposed that he could fake his credentials and open up shop as one of the ambulance chasers advertising on refrigerator magnets the galaxy over, but it still wouldn't get him back to Gallifrey.

Back to Gallifrey. Gallifrey, back to. The very words were ridiculous, and not half so ridiculous as anything that he might possibly do if he ever got there. There ought to have been a book. _What to Expect When You're Expecting to be Evil._

Eyes still on the mirror, he leant in slightly. Long, spare frame; eyes apt to squint. Grim and sallow features, marshaled into a sort of mask, but mobile. Not much hair, but as he'd had such a superfluity for most of his lives he supposed he could live with it.

There was already anger in the back of the eyes.

(The _knowing_ would come.)

He seemed to recall a real penchant for cackling. Watching in the mirror, he deformed his mouth into an asymmetric, flaccid shape, tilting his head back and raising his ribcage up.

"A—ah—ha—ha."

He closed his mouth, still looking into the mirror closely, as if his reflection would signify approval when he found the mark. He shifted his thorax.

"Ah—ha-ha—ha. Ha."

The sink tap dripped more copper onto a green stain. "Mwah-haha," the Doctor tried again, unable to help feeling that there was something missing. "Muwah-ha-ha-ha, haha, ha. Hahaha-_hah_, hahaha-_hah_, HA ha HA ha HA." Still lacking somehow. He tried adding an exclamation point. "Ha! Muahaha! HA! Oh, dear. Múwah-hahaha, áh-hahahá, _long_-short-short-long, _long_-short-short-long. Múa-hahahaHA, m_oooooooooooä_hahahaha. Er. Har-haha? HA-haháhaha_há_. Muuu—oh, it's hopeless."

He drummed his fingers on the rim of the sink and tried to pretend that something in his breast had not just shattered. This was easy to do.

"It could," he said after a bit, "just be coincidence. I've done it before." He looked again into the mirror as if checking for an answer. "Frankly, regenerating by accident into someone you had on good authority would be a part of your last incarnation is positively functional compared to regenerating into somebody who once shot you. Or into your dead boyfriend's best body just so you can play with his bits."

He rested his forehead against the cool glass. "I can't be." He couldn't be. He didn't even know how to cackle. "_I can't be_." Certainly looked liked he was.

Perhaps because of his odd posture, he suddenly noticed that something felt funny. He reached up and flattened a hand against his chest. His mouth went a bit dry.

He'd only got one heart, again.

The Valeyard saw his hand flowing forward, and then the mirror scattered around it. He watched as the cuts and punctures closed in still-adaptive skin. He should leave, he imagined. Someone would come sooner or later, and he was a wanted murderer now on this planet.

Dawn was breaking for the first sun, bleaching out the long rose-colored stretch of the Courrolian night. The warmly laughing waves shifted from green to blue as the light thinned out to show true values, and _sh'ika_ passing the night in their nests tethered by seaweed were erupting from the surface here and there to bypass the cliffs and wing their way farther inland. Scavengers were already coming for the dog; the Doctor carried it to the end of the rocks and gave it to the sea, where at least none of the scavengers would be intelligent.

Then he turned east. He picked his way along the shoreline toward the TARDIS, shucking his old clothing as he went.


	2. Two

Two

_Why did Constantinople get the works?_

_(that's nobody's business but the Turks')_

The Doctor skidded to a halt. The student who'd been pelting down the corridor beside him and whose hand the Doctor had been holding yelped as its shoulder was nearly dislocated.

"What's that?" said the Doctor, pointing at a screened niche, one of a series.

Young Zalo massaged its shoulder with a tentacle. "Student health services. It's a psychiatric emergency booth."

The Doctor looked from side to side. "Why do you have corridors lined with psychiatric emergency booths?"

Zalo shrugged. "It's the liberal arts department."

The Doctor slid back one of the screens. "Is that a telephone?"

"Yeah, rings directly to the suicide hotline. Look, Doctor—"

"Ah, I beg your pardon. Do hurry along to the laboratory, you can just beat Fahnsiingx. Let's see, what else? Oh." He felt around in his jacket. "Here, give this data card to Jarriban, that should put everything back on its proper course. I'll catch you up."

"But _Doctor—_!"

The Doctor placed his hands on Zalo's orange shoulders; the student turned its eye up to him, the black squiggle of pupil wide with worry. "All the years you've studied, Zalo, you've waited for your chance to make a real difference in the world, a chance for a practical application of all you've learned. Am I right?"

"Not really. I'm a classics major."

"A classics major is exactly what this situation requires."

"How is a classics major going to stop a megalomaniac crashing the stock market?"

"By running. Now, _run!"_

With a helpful shove forward, Zalo was off, pounding desperately down the deserted corridor again. The Doctor went back to the psychiatric emergency booth. He considered for a moment, and then slid into the seat.

Graffiti that qualified as pornographic for a self-fertilizing hermaphrodite adorned the inside of the privacy screen. The Doctor took a moment to familiarize himself with the cramped interior of the niche before he picked up the phone headset and pressed the only key available.

"Ziiweeg University suicide hotline," said an androgynous voice, soothingly.

"I'm thinking of killing myself," said the Doctor. "Actually, that's something of an understatement. I practically have to."

"I'm sure that isn't true," said the operator. "There are always possibilities."

"Too many, in fact. History is becoming unruly."

Short, confused pause, then a confident, sympathetic continuation. "No matter how bad things may seem, we can help you to work through them. All we need is for you to stay on the phone with us for a little while. Can you do that?"

The Doctor consulted his watch. "Within reason."

"Great. You're doing great. Can I transfer you to a counselor?"

"Oh, yes, thanks."

"Okay. Can you tell me your name?"

He hesitated only for a moment. "The Doctor. Just 'the Doctor,' for now."

"All right, Doctor. There's going to be a short pause while I connect your call. I'll need you to hang in there for me. Can you do that?"

"I imagine so."

The phone beeped and went to soft static. The Doctor crossed his legs at the knee and hummed the title to _Brazil._

A moment later, a new voice filtered through. "Hi, I'm Neelu. Is this the Doctor?"

"That's me."

"I understand things aren't going so well, just now."

"For certain values of 'now,' that's something of an understatement."

Neelu missed a beat, but only one. "Do you want to talk about it?"

He breathed out. "I—yes. Yes, I do. It's only that it is… difficult to know where to start."

"Sometimes things are so complicated that they don't seem to have a starting point."

"Oh, this has one."

"I gather you're feeling pretty desperate about it."

"Desperate?" He considered. "Desperate: bereft of hope. No, not quite."

"Well, that's a good start. Can you tell me a little about what you have hope in?"

"Not easily. To be honest, Neelu, it wasn't so much my feelings I wanted to discuss."

Neelu's voice turned confused and slightly less supportive. "All right. What do you want to talk about?"

"You seem to have been at this for some time. You must have talked to a good many potential suicides by now, yes?"

"Yes," it said, guardedly.

"Out of, say, every hundred callers, I assume that five or six have gone ahead and done it anyway."

A short pause. "Yes," said Neelu, voice hard.

The Doctor smiled gently, though his conversationalist couldn't see it. "Never fear, Neelu. I don't intend to discuss your feelings, either. No, what I wanted to ask is: What, in your opinion, are the chief effects of suicide? How would you characterize the fallout, both expected and unexpected?"

Neelu's voice was now patently angry. "Who are you? Why are you doing this? You're not a student, and you don't sound suicidal to me."

"Come, come. Unless the Ziiweeg undergraduate student body is unique in the cosmos, you must get calls from the faculty occasionally."

"All right, that's it—"

"Cousin Neelu," the Doctor said softly.

For a moment, he thought it had hung up. Then it said, "Yes, cousin?"

"I assure you, I am seriously considering killing myself, and that I value your assistance. Thinking about this has become so difficult."

"Fine," said Neelu at last. "You want to know what kind of mess it makes when someone kills itself?"

"Your experience of the quality and magnitude of the impact of suicide on the world, yes."

"Then you're right, I can tell you a little bit about that. First: family. Do you have a family?"

"Not anymore."

Personally he thought that a little sympathy at this juncture would have been good form for a counselor, though he didn't want any. Luckily, he seemed to have pushed Neelu too far for that; it went on with nary a decorous pause. "Second: friends. You do have some?"

He hesitated. "Yes, I do, though many of them I have not seen for a very long time. But… they would never know."

Neelu's voice softened fractionally. "Is that what this is about, Doctor? Isolation is something I know a lot about."

He stared moodily at the pornography on the door. "It's a factor. They are factors. But they aren't the cause. I am."

"Doctor, you've lost me. If you want my help, you can have it. But you're going to have to talk to me."

He thought for a moment, weighing how much to tell it and how.

"There was a war. You won't have heard about it."

He took its quiet breathing as encouragement. "As civilizations so often like to do, my people decided to build a weapon of such scale that it could end that war and all others. 'This war is a terrible thing,' they said to themselves. So someone piped up and said, 'What we want, cousins, is a weapon.' And though you might not like where this is going, Neelu, I'm not sure that they weren't right.

"It needed only one operator. It was so awful that it really could only have one operator. When Ro— When my president failed, the mission fell to me. It was a dirty weapon. I used it, killing trillions on both sides, and the war, more or less, ended.

"But the price has been higher than any of us had calculated. Believe me when I tell you that that is saying something. Unforeseen complications are coming to light, and I live in fear of their consequences for history. It is difficult to explain how, but there's a possibility that my death could put things back on the right track. It could stop the holocaust from ever— It could stop it from happening all over again."

There was a silence before he heard Neelu's voice again.

"Oh, well, hell, do it, then."

_"What?"_

"I don't know! I don't know whether to believe a word you say!"

"You've nothing to lose by believing me!"

"By humoring you, you mean."

"Is that all you're in the business of doing, then?"

"No, Doctor. We're in the business of saving lives by talking our cousins out of death. You seem to be looking for someone to talk you into it."

"I don't think I need to be talked into it. Reality is doing that for me. Long ago, I believed that there must always be another way. Then, for many lives, I believed that there always should be another way. Now—well. Foreknowledge has a way of eroding idealism."

"You sound like a cynic, Doctor, but you don't sound to me like someone who wants to die."

"I haven't any choice!" The words tore out to his own surprise. "I've got to try! Everything else has failed—" He broke off, and when he spoke again, his voice was calm again. "I must act."

"Must you?" Neelu countered. "Why haven't you, then? I'll tell you what I think, Doctor; I think you haven't done it yet because you still know that there _is_ another way, somewhere, and that if you hang on you can find it—"

He scoffed. "I haven't done it yet, Cousin, simply because I don't really know what will happen if I do. I don't even know _how."_

"Er—not that I want to give you any ideas, but it's usually pretty straightforward."

"Not in my case," he muttered. Overbearing prigs though they'd been, the CIA would have been useful just about now. As many times as he'd intersected his past and future incarnations, he'd never done it alone. Not even the Master had, and the Doctor had an uneasy feeling about that. And now he wore this form. As many times as he'd stared at it in the mirror, he still didn't know what it meant, if it meant anything. All the temporal authorities he'd once have been too arrogant to ask for guidance had burnt with Gallifrey. "I've got to do something," he said finally.

"There are always possibilities."

"Your colleague said that, too. It didn't know how right it was."

Neelu snorted. "If you tried hard, do you think you could be more condescending?"

"Oh, much. But I've largely given up the habit of picking up people to practice on. I'm too busy darning history to wander, to really travel as I used to. Being Time's Valet is something of a full-time job. There may be possibilities, but alternatives exclude."

"Yes, Doctor. That's life."

"Now who's being condescending, cousin?"

"Fine, maybe you do know everything. But I'll tell you one thing: Out of all the people I've known who killed themselves, only a couple really understood that it's the most final thing you'll ever do."

He started to speak, but stopped himself. After a moment, he asked tentatively, "Who?" Neelu was silent for a bit, and he gentled his tone. "Neelu? I didn't mean who understood."

"You said you didn't intend to discuss my feelings, Doctor," said Neelu, voice surprisingly amused. "That was the agreement."

He buried his head in his hands. "I've been through this a thousand times, over and over, and I get nowhere."

"Then go through it with me."

Head between his palms, he spoke almost to himself. "It's not time that's relative; it's events. You have no idea how fragile history is, Neelu. I know you don't, because I can scarcely believe it myself. Yet it used to be durable. Take your own planet, for instance. The most significant events can hinge on the most unlikely moments, like today, and on the most unlikely places, like this university. Once, interference was the greatest threat the whole web faced; so long as it was left alone, serendipity would find a way to mix together timing, location, economics, and a classics major and get what it needed. You could still manage damage, but it took doing, or at the very least it took a time machine."

"Doctor, you're right about serendipity, and how fragile things are." The Doctor smiled faintly; Neelu had the tone of someone vigorously ignoring the parts of his speech that it didn't understand to go in for the kill on the part it thought it did. "Please believe me, you can't predict everything that will happen if you kill yourself. No one ever understands all the fallout, not really."

"That's what I'm afraid of, Neelu. But I can't predict what will happen if I just wait to die, either. This is my last body. It's my last chance to choose an end for myself. Which uncertainty frightens me more? I've lost track of how many holes in history I've patched up in the last few years, and I don't know how much longer I can keep doing this. I did my share of maintenance when I travelled for travel's sake, yes, but mainly when I happened upon things. Walking into a situation intentionally and _knowing_ what you must do is—different. Even if you can bear to bring your friends into that, you tend to lose them when nothing you do is ever fair."

"Patching up—? Doctor, I don't understand what you're saying."

He sighed. "I know."

Neelu's voice was uncertain and fragile, as though it were afraid without quite knowing why. "What did you mean about fixing things?"

"I gave one of your fellow beings a data card," he said, not really as an answer. "I didn't tell it what was on it, but it took it, because it trusted me. It hasn't known me very long; it seemed to act on instinct. I don't think its trust was misplaced, precisely. Young Zalo told me it's a classics major, so I'm sure it has studied history. Perhaps one day it will understand that some things must happen because they already have. Perhaps. If that remains true."

"Doctor—"

"Please understand, it's not that I bear you any ill will. On the contrary, if I weren't about to cause your next economic dark age and thus probably become _persona non grata_, I should rather like to stay here for a bit. A nice, friendly planet where 'Go fuck yourself' is a blessing and not a curse makes a welcome change, really."

"What are you talking about? Should I call the police? I should call the police," said Neelu with an edge to its voice, as though its mind were racing to figure out what it would tell the police if it did call them.

"I'm afraid it would do you little good. Even if they knew what to look for, the Economic Computing Complex is very large, and things have probably already begun." He uncrossed his legs and began shaking life back into the one that had fallen asleep. "Thank you for all your help, Neelu. You really are very good at what you do."

"I-I-I…"

"By the bye, Neelu? Do you have a stock market portfolio?"

"Yes."

"You might want to liquidate that."

He stood. "You were right. It is different, going over things with another person. Quite helpful. Good-bye, Neelu."

"Doctor, wait—!"

He rang off.

Sliding back the screen and stepping into the corridor, the Doctor made a habitual check for security. Fluorescent lights were all that greeted him, so he stepped across to the washroom.

It was the weekend and the entire wing was empty, so no one disturbed him as he gazed at his reflection over the washroom sink. Twenty-first century suiting, today. It already irritated him. Five years since his regeneration, and he'd yet to find a costume that was comfortable; evidently he'd decided to spend his last life going through the entire TARDIS wardrobe. Or maybe he was doing that simply because he hadn't any companions to do it for him.

He thought about asking Zalo or Neelu to come with him. He'd liked them, and perhaps if they could see what was at stake firsthand, they'd forgive him for what he'd done to their planet. That might be nice.

He dashed icy saline over his face. It was out of the question, of course. One companion always led to another, and he couldn't put this off for another decade or six. He'd procrastinated enough. He must find the way.

The Doctor straightened his tie, his next step finally clear in his mind. Neelu wasn't the sort of counselor he needed.

* * *

Navigation requires maps. Maps require a point of reference. But time doesn't need to find its way; it's only beings who have such concerns.

Only by degrees had the Doctor begun to play with the idea that the universe in its natural state might be downright inimical to what he and everybody else understood as time. Once he had begun, though, he could scarcely do anything else, because dealing with the empirical support for the idea was becoming something of a full-time job.

As anyone who spent a lot of time defusing doomsday devices would, the Doctor had given some thought to ways the universe could end. By the time he was midway through his eleventh life, he was pretty sure he'd spent more time thinking about it than even Davros ever had, which was really just depressing for them both. Having been to Utopia, he had no choice but to hold with those who favored ice, but there were so many other ways it could have ended all at once had he not intervened. There were devices made to tap into the susurrating energy of fractional dimensions, with the unfortunate design flaw that they would have started a chain reaction like a cosmos-wide stellar ignition if they'd ever been used. There were entropy weapons of such scale that only one race could ever have been insane enough to manufacture them. There were antimatter creatures, and anti-energy creatures, and anti-time creatures. There were crude temporal terraforming projects, foolish and infinitely corruptible, that if applied just so could hatch one reality inside another and so devour it. There were bombs of varying kinds, and dimension cannons, and, of course, Daleks.

So, the Doctor had considered a lot of ways the universe could end. What he had never envisioned was the entire universe not ending, but transfiguring past all recognition.

His time machine kept working. He should have thought it was funny that he didn't think that was funny.

* * *

In the past few years (few by his standards), journeys had fallen into a pattern. Like a groundskeeper checking the night's traps behind the garden, each time he stepped into the console room the Doctor would consult the various scanners he'd cobbled together and see which thread of spacetime was fraying now. Then, if he could get inside the wrinkle, he'd head for it. Sometimes the TARDIS would intercede to guide him away from his intended destination to something more important that he'd missed—she was very kind about it, too, hardly ever scolding him for his stupidity. But she, like him, was getting tired, so she did not murmur when this time he shelved the decaying correlation between the timelines of one planet and its neighbor and all the effects that promised to radiate from it, setting the coordinates instead for an innocuous time zone on Earth.

He set down in a leafy lane with cracking asphalt. Fields stretched out beyond the hedgerow, so obviously good pastureland that the absence of any animal sounds more robust than birdsong left a pervasive emptiness. A lovely, slightly hollow world. The road signs looked turn of the twenty-first century vintage, which matched the empty farmland. He was probably on time, then. He was pleased.

He was clearly a little less on the nose geographically, but he'd deliberately eschewed precision; a walk suited him just now. Thus it was after some miles of ambling and several wild guesses about the roads that he knocked at the door of an old country house he was mostly sure he'd been in before.

The door was opened by a middle-aged woman wiping her hands on a dishrag. She looked mildly surprised; the Doctor didn't know whether this was because the house saw few visitors or because his clothing was a century-and-a-half out of date.

"Good day," he said, doffing his hat and immediately ingratiating himself. "Is your master at home?"

The woman blinked and smiled at his quaintness, but she didn't seem bothered by it. "Yes, he is," said the not-quite-young human. "You've just missed lunch. Shall I find him for you?"

"Please. Tell him an old friend is here to see him."

"One tick. Come on in."

She disappeared into the corridor leading off from the foyer, then reemerged to beckon him into the depths of the house. Sunlight spilled in and glanced from picture frames and china ornaments; a breeze from somewhere lifted the cross-stitched hem of the cloth on a credenza. The housekeeper left him an airy parlor with a friendly "Here you are" and nipped back from whence she'd come.

An old man sat with a cup of tea and a newspaper he wasn't reading. Two small girls sat on the carpet at his feet: One looked straight ahead and tried to keep a straight face between giggles while the other focused intently on braiding the first girl's hair. Over, under, over; comb, separate, combine, pause. The Doctor recognized the style as what so many human children he'd known had coached him to call a French braid. She took up another free lock of hair; those strands were laid parallel with those already in her hand and bent to the plait's widening course. Neither paid him the slightest attention.

"Doctor," said the Brigadier, glancing up, clear-eyed.

The Doctor smiled. "Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart."

Alistair's glance fell to the girls for a moment before he looked back at the Doctor. He'd grown a beard to match his moustache and he'd spread a bit, but it seemed to the Doctor that he'd never seen a more familiar sight. "You're a surprise, old man. I've not seen you for years. Actually, I've not seen you in that body at all, I don't think."

"But you recognize me?"

"I dare say I do," said Alistair, bringing himself to his feet just long enough to gesture the Doctor to a chair, "though there was scarcely anyone else it could have been. Do you know, Doctor, you always made it sound like a mystic Time Lord trick, recognizing old acquaintances in new bodies, but I'm convinced that all it takes is practice."

The Doctor felt himself smiling like he hadn't known this face could smile. "Canny as always, Lethbridge-Stewart."

The housekeeper poked her head in through the door. "Here's a cuppa for your friend, Sir Alistair," she said, handing Doris's china to the Doctor. "Do you want me to take the girls out to the garden?"

The Doctor and the Brigadier both looked down at them. "No, thank you, Mattie."

The Doctor sipped his tea and nodded toward them as Mattie left. "Grandchildren, I presume? Your side, or Doris's?"

"One of each. Her son's youngest, and my sister's only granddaughter."

"You say more in front of them than I think I've ever heard you tell the prime minister."

Alistair settled back in his chair as the tail-ends of his bloodline switched positions with the comb. "Elizabeth is deaf, and Jo doesn't listen to a word I say. Besides, they have more sense than the prime minister."

The Doctor's eyes lit up. "Liz and Jo."

"A coincidence, but rather a good one, I agree."

The Doctor closed his eyes and tipped his head back against the chair, smelling the tea and the air from the window and the commingled odors of the Brigadier's age and young people covered in crumbs and jam. "Thank you for the cuppa," he said, eyes still shut.

"Any time. So, have you come to pull me along into an adventure?"

"Mmm? No, no adventures. Were you wanting one?"

"Oh, I'm all right as I am. But I stay at the ready."

The Doctor opened his eyes. "My dear Brigadier," he said, "I didn't doubt it for an instant."

They sat in companionable silence for a long stretch, and the Doctor thought that he had denied himself this for too long. He wouldn't any longer. He'd have some visits like this, maybe help Doris in the garden, do things properly before he went.

Wherever he went. However he went.

"Something on your mind, Doctor?"

The Doctor snorted. "Brigadier, there is always something on my mind. Empty pockets, empty mind, and my pockets are dimensionally transcendent." To underscore his point and entertain Elizabeth, who was glancing up at him, he stuck his hand in his waistcoat and with a flourish produced—lint. "Oh." He floundered a moment. "Well, the other ones are."

Alistair frowned slightly. "Goodness, Doctor, something is worrying you."

That brought him up short. "Is it that obvious?" he said weakly. "Never mind, I don't want to ruin a good visit. Do you know, Brigadier, you've seen almost all of me? All of me but one, there was only one before I knew you. I don't think anybody else has known me that long, reckoning it like that, not even any Time Lords. It's so good to see you, Alistair. Did I ever tell you about—"

He broke off his babbling as the Brigadier, whom he'd not seen rising, touched his shoulder. The Doctor looked up into his face.

It only lasted a moment before Alistair moved carefully back to his chair. "Jo," he said as she and Elizabeth looked up from shoving toothpicks into the dirt of the pot plants. "Run along to the garden and ask your grandmother if you may have some flowers for a nice centerpiece at supper."

"Sorry," said the Doctor quietly as Jo and Elizabeth scampered out of the room.

"Don't be. Unless you're bringing calamity in your wake, of course."

The Doctor looked up at him. "Sorry."

"Ah." Alistair steepled his fingers with a look that was less philosophical than it was shrewd, like the Brigadier the Doctor remembered from his active days. "Is it a matter for U.N.I.T.?" he said after a moment.

"What? No, no, nothing so immediate. I wouldn't disturb your peace, not when you're—"

The Brigadier smiled. "Not when I'm this old?"

_Not when you're this happy._ "Not when you're this bald."

"We two old men finally have something in common, then. Anyway, what is this crisis that's reduced you to empty pockets? It can't be anything very urgent, if you're here passing the time of day. Or is some young friend of yours off doing the damage on her own?"

"Passing the time of—? No sense of scale, that's your problem, Lethbridge-Stewart. I _have_ been off in the TARDIS working on this, many times. Would you believe me if I told you the universe was going to pieces?"

To his credit, the Brigadier took a moment to consider. "I'm not sure it would mean anything if I did."

"Wise man. Always know your own limitations. As many times as I've seen the evidence, now, I'm not really sure I believe it myself. It would be terrible to misdiagnose the whole universe, wouldn't it?"

The Doctor suddenly jumped up and went to the bookcase, rummaging around the shelves. "What are you looking for?" Alistair called.

"Pen and paper!"

"On the writing table, right-hand drawer."

"Ah." The Doctor returned, going to one knee beside the Brigadier's armchair, and spread a sheaf of the Lethbridge-Stewarts' embossed stationery in the toast crumbs on the coffee table. "Here. We'll leave out a few dimensions. Causality is like a fabric, a slightly elastic fabric. Do you remember when I explained to you about the Web of Time?"

"What? No, I don't believe I ever heard you call it such a thing."

The Doctor frowned. "Your memory's going, I remember it distinctly. Oh, never mind. In any case, they didn't call it a web for nothing: Imagine some strands, representing you and I, knitted together, like so." The Doctor sketched two wavy lines, overlapping each other at regular intervals. "My strand is actually a great deal longer and loops around and wiggles and is generally more complex than yours, but never mind that."

"Oh, thanks."

"But you can see the implication. Add a thousand million strands like that, all twining round each other, and you have quite a strong fabric. You can rip it, or undo it all if you sever the right strands in the wrong places, but without any meddling, the cloth should withstand a great deal of strain. But it's strong because all the threads exert a certain balancing pull on each other. They influence each other, in short. The web is a fabric because of causality, and causality exists because the web is a fabric."

"Doctor, the way you talk, sometimes I think you ought to have been a barrister instead of a scientist."

The Doctor's pen veered off the paper. "That isn't funny."

Alistair focussed on him more sharply, but said nothing.

The Doctor pursed his lips and straightened the paper. "As I was saying, Lethbridge-Stewart—and I wouldn't have to if you would only remember when we went through all this before—each place these strands touch is a nexus of causality. And there is a strand not only for every being in the universe, but for every object, for every atom, for every particle, for every thing to which we can assign a history. Some mesh together more tightly than others, either because they're twisted together more tightly or because they've been forced into the same wrinkle or valley. The fabric stays intact because the threads communicate some of their tension to their neighbors. Take us, for example: here again, you and I, two slender threads. And a third, looping in once, crossing our paths and tugging on both of us. That one's Evelyn."

"Who's Evelyn?" asked the Brigadier.

"Come now, Brigadier. My grand old lady of history. You met her."

"I'm afraid I haven't."

The Doctor was torn between irritation and threatening grief. Surely it wasn't true. Surely he wasn't lost in his own head, not Lethbridge-Stewart. Alistair's mind simply couldn't be going. The housekeeper would have said something, there would have been signs before, and above all it wasn't _right_. "You're going senile!"

Alistair glowered and gave the hem of his jumper a sharp yank, an echo of just about every conversation they'd ever had. "I am doing nothing of the sort." He leant forward, and his gaze certainly seemed clear enough. "My name is Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, the date is June the twelfth, 2011, and I remember every one of your friends I've ever met rather distinctly!"

Something almost worse than the grief crept into the Doctor's blood. "Lanyon Moor never happened for you?"

Alistair blinked. "Lanyon Moor? That business with the pixies? Of course it happened for me. How did you know about that?"

The Doctor froze. "Alistair, it happened for us both."

"I should think I'd remember that."

_"We were right on top of each other._ We succeeded together, we succeeded _because_ of each other!"

"I don't deny that the things I'd learnt from you were indispensable to me in the matter, but—"

The Doctor sprang to his feet, upsetting the table and the papers on it. "No! No, it isn't true! It's not fair!"

"Doctor?" said Alistair, bewildered. "Get ahold of yourself, man. Whatever is the matter?"

"I came back for this history, and now it isn't even all there! The decay is setting all our threads adrift, but I thought—I thought I was different. But why can't I forget, too? I shouldn't miss it if I could forget how things should be, like everybody else. Why am I the key?"

"Doctor." Alistair had got up again though it was clearly difficult, good old Alistair, not dead yet, and he'd taken hold of the Doctor's arm. It felt like it was more for the Doctor's support than the Brigadier's. "I don't understand a word you're saying, but won't you let me help you?"

The Doctor shut his eyes and let out his breath. "I'm sorry, Brigadier, but you can't." He opened his eyes again and patted the hand on his arm, and the other man let go. "There's something I need to do."

"God in heaven, please don't say you've come back to tell me you love me."

The Doctor laughed in spite of everything. "Brigadier, your moustaches were never that fine."

"Doctor," said Alistair after a moment, "will you be all right? There's something queer about you, and I can't quite put my finger on what."

The Doctor smiled thinly. "I shall put all things right, whatever it takes."

"Oh. Well, come again for tea when you're done."

Laughing again, the Doctor shook his head. He felt lighter, suddenly. He still didn't know how to fix this, still had nowhere to turn for guidance, and now he knew the causal decay was nibbling even at his own timeline, he should have felt heavier than ever. But if he could only have this one old friend with him to the last, he felt, he could do this. "I will. You recognized me, Brigadier. I didn't recognize me, but you did. That's enough."

Alistair picked up the Doctor's drawing. "I'll put this on the refrigerator; it'll look smashing next to Liz and Jo's. I should go find them, by the way. Will you stay for dinner? Doris would be delighted to see you."

The Doctor shook his head. "I'd best start preparations. But save a jam tart for me; I'll be back."

"One jam tart. And Doctor?"

The Doctor turned in the doorway.

"Good luck."

The Doctor found his own way out, and stood blinking on the drive for a moment, breathing. Yes. He could do this.

He set off.

In the lane where he'd left the TARDIS, he paused with the key in the door. He'd thought he'd seen a flash of blue coat—but there was no one, and he was the only one who wore a coat in this weather anyway. He went in.

"Hello again, my girl." The light in the console room was soft, as it had been since the War; she wrapped a silent greeting around him as her heart thrummed beneath his feet. "I've just been to see my second-oldest friend. I couldn't tell him, of course, I couldn't possibly explain what I have to do, but to speak with him has been useful nevertheless. You and I, too: We'll say our goodbyes properly. We'll do something marvelous together before we go."

Invisible signals pulsed across her skin in something that was not quite thought and not quite emotion either, as most beings understood it. The Doctor smiled. "Quite."

His hands played over the console, leaving behind June the twelfth, 2011, and his nagging feeling he had missed something. Then he began pulling data collected from this time zone up on the screen. He was looking for something he'd never so much as glanced at before: the Brigadier's personal history. He needed to know it now so he could work out how many more visits he could have. He felt the need to ration those visits out as if they were his own very life.

The computer paused for a moment, sorting Lethbridge-Stewart's thread out from all the others, then displayed the information on the screen.

_Sir Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, 16 December 1929 — 13 June, 2011. Died quietly in his sleep of natural causes, surrounded by his loved ones._

The Doctor blinked, dry-eyed. He had an idea that even he would have wanted to cry about that. He didn't know why he couldn't. Lethbridge-Stewart had been the _last_ friend, the friend he'd been saving up. The last thread that went almost all the way back to the beginning.

He stood quietly at the console for a long time.

At last he stirred as a memory came to him, the words as clear as if they'd been spoken aloud: _Five rounds rapid._ That had been the Brigadier, always direct.

If he was going to do this, he was going to do it cleanly. No fuss, no muss, no traps, no trials. Some force in the universe might have thought it would be a good joke to give him this face at the end, but he wasn't playing the game. He would intersect himself somewhere far away from Gallifrey and do what he had to do. Whether it would really prove so easy, he didn't know, but he could certainly try it. Retroactive suicide seemed the only chance, but that was all he would undertake. Five rounds rapid. A simple execution.


End file.
